Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Mom-ing: Crappy Day

You ever have one of those days that are going so poorly you have to either laugh or cry about it? Well today is one of those days. It all started when I tried to have a Skype date with one of my friends while the kids were still awake. It's been a long time since I've attempted to pull off this maneuver but it used to be that I could just transport my kids to the magical land of Disney and I would be free to do whatever I needed. Alas, those days are gone. Liam and Darcie were pretty indignant that I was using Skype and that they were not being shown off. And though they kept to their boundary of the living room -- a whole three feet away from where I was sitting -- they laid pitifully at the edge of the living room and reached out to me with imploring hands.

I pressed on. I probably ought to have just thrown in the towel on all my plans for the day once I saw where it was headed but I didn't. So, turning up the volume of my laptop really loudly, I continued chatting with my friend over the sound of their whining.

When my Skype date ended I went to give my two oldest some love and attention and this turned into an unspoken competition for who could claim the most snuggle space with me. Just as we reached a truce it was time to get Adelaide up! This caused another round of whiny indignation.

I feel I ought to mention here that my kids are not generally whiny and they are even more rarely jealous of each other or compete for my attention, so this day was so far out from their normal range of behavior that I was quickly becoming frazzled. It has been one of those stretching days that you secretly hope never comes along.

As Adelaide was nursing, Darcie announced she had to go pee. I told her she had to go by herself this time and she did a good job trying but she had an accident on the bathroom floor. After I got that cleaned up I slapped some pb&j's together for Liam and Darcie, plunked Adelaide into her Bumbo, and then scarfed down some food while spooning babyfood into her mouth. I ate so quickly though that I became nauseous. This was not helped either by the fact that Liam and Adelaide were having a one-ups-manship competition for number of smelly poops. Liam won the number of consecutive smelly movements but Adelaide retaliated nicely with copious amounts of foul beef-babyfood smelling spit-ups. See? I bet even you're nauseous now!

Finally it was nap time. I changed one last round of diapers & pull-ups, took Darcie to the bathroom, sent the oldest two up to their beds, and slung Adelaide up onto my hip. As I was trudging defeatedly up the stairs she decided to give me one last slew of spit-up for good measure. It went all over the stairs and onto my jeans. Just as I was inspecting the damage to my pants and was about to let out an exasperated sigh, I saw it.

There was a turd stuck to my jeans, clinging on for dear life.

And that's when I started laughing hysterically.